Annoyed at a recent federal ruling that could nullify the credentials of thousands of public school teachers, Texas education advocates want Washington to waive a technicality they say would cause teachers and districts needless headaches.
Brian Thevenot
Brian Thevenot was an education editor at the Tribune in 2009-10. Previously he spent a dozen years at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, most recently as special projects editor. As part of a team that covered the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, Thevenot contributed multiple bylines to two winning entries for Pulitzer Prizes in breaking news and public service. His Katrina reporting also won the Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the News from Northwestern University, and the Medal of Valor from the National Association of Minority Media Executives. In 2009, an eight-part series Thevenot edited, chronicling the investigation into an all-too-routine murder of a New Orleans teenager, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. In 2005, just before Katrina, Thevenot spent a month reporting on Louisiana soldiers in Baghdad and produced a three-part deadline narrative about squad of soldiers hit by a deadly roadside bomb, which was a finalist for Livingston Award. In 2003, he won a National Headliner Award for education reporting for his 2002 five-part narrative tracking an eighth-grader's struggle to pass Louisiana’s high-stakes standardized test. Before joining the Times-Picayune, Thevenot worked as a suburban reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Oklahoma City, Thevenot has a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Education Commissioner Asks Feds to Reconsider Stripping Texas Teacher Credentials
“The real issue here is, you don’t do something like this after school starts,” Scott said in an interview this afternoon. “And you don’t just decide it in a letter or an email… They leave themselves open to criticism and litigation when they do something outside the rule-making process.”
Teacher Credentials May Be Nullified By Feds
Thousands of “highly qualified” Texas public school teachers don’t actually meet the federal definition for that standard — which could jeopardize their jobs and will certainly cause bureaucratic headaches for them and their school systems.


